Artist Reinvents Ancient Scrolls, Complete with Farsi

Photo: Stephen Voss

Photo: Stephen Voss

Photo: Hadieh Shafie and Leila Heller Gallery

Photo: Hadieh Shafie and Leila Heller Gallery

Photo: Hadieh Shafie and Leila Heller Gallery

Scrolls: cryptic, ancient documents, filled with lost languages or tales of bygone eras. Except when they’re just straight-up art. Hadieh Shafie packs together hundreds of multicolored paper coils, each concealing a message in Farsi — first language to her, completely alien to most of her audience. “You want to access the information that’s inside, but you realize you can’t,” Shafie says. “It’s the second layer to the work.”

To make her eye-catching installations, Shafie spends months wrapping strips of paper into circular whorls. She writes the Farsi word eshghe (usually translated as “love”) repeatedly on the strips. The result: spools of paper crowded together, with loops of Farsi peeking out. Shafie’s Telesm series goes on display in September at Art Platform in Los Angeles. You can lean in close or gaze from a distance — and wait for all to be revealed.